The upshot seems to be that we mostly all agree after all. 🙂

Seriously, though, worth reading over.

I get told that I am more interested in social experiments than in gameplay all the time. Frankly, I am a bit sick of it. So I want to rant.

I said this in the comments to another post.

A game where the only productive activity is to kill things is the social experiment. A game where people can dance at a bar is more like normal humanity. 🙂

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Terra Nova has what apparently is T. L.’s last post, and it’s about player-centered design.

Is anyone (any company? any commercial enterprise?) integrating something roughly called “player-centered design” into their MMOG dev processes or is that wording the kind that makes the practicing designer cringe as it seems to undermine the artistic/auteur aspect of producing a game?

The first temptation is to answer “anyone who isn’t player-centered in their design is an idiot.”

After all, the entire discipline of design — and I don’t mean game design, I mean all of design — is about user responses. It’s about holding a conversation with the intended user of an artifact (I was going to type “product” there and then changed my mind), via the artifact itself.

And yet, I know that a lot of folks (such as the ones who typically bash me on, say, game or guild forums, will say that I’m far from being player-centered in my own designs. I’m a poster child for ignoring what players want, right?

The question, to my mind, is “where is the player, really?” and that’s not an easy question to answer.

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